About the Author

Despite the insistence of America's
artistic elites and environmental activists that people abandon the
suburbs in favor of denser living arrangements, most Americans
continue to exhibit a decided preference for single-family,
detached, suburban-style housing on lots large enough to ensure
some measure of privacy and easy access to nature's blessings.
Efforts to force people into densely packed town and cluster
housing or multifamily high-rise buildings consistently fail to
attract public support. For the most part, many of those who choose
to live in denser multifamily housing and townhouses do so for
reasons of limited income and often forgo these arrangements once
more expansive options become affordable.

Having failed to achieve their objectives
in most communities, environmentalists and urban planners have
turned to the federal government for help to enact legislation that
offers federal tax dollars to encourage communities to adopt their
"smart growth" plans. Typical of this effort is the Community
Character Act, introduced in the Senate as S. 975 and in the House
of Representatives as H.R. 1433. This legislation would provide $25
million of federal tax dollars each year to states, communities,
and tribal councils to use in implementing land use planning
schemes that conform more closely to how environmentalists want
American communities to be arranged.

Among the factors driving
environmentalists to discourage the traditional pattern of suburban
development is a belief that such growth consumes undeveloped land
at a pace that jeopardizes the availability of open space, natural
settings, wilderness, and farmland. Federal data on land use reveal
such concerns to be misplaced; in fact, only 5.2 percent of the
land in the continental United States meets the government's
definition of "developed." Nevertheless, so-called smart growth and
new urbanist advocates are undeterred in their efforts to impose
costly and constraining limits on how individuals may develop and
use their private property.

Although there is no precise definition
for a "smart growth" policy or what exactly the "new urbanist"
strictures would entail, such policies generally seek to preserve
land in its natural or agricultural state by encouraging people to
live in denser, city-like communities that take up smaller amounts
of land per housing unit. Such communities would achieve other
related smart growth goals, such as encouraging residents to rely
more on walking or public transit than on cars for mobility. The
policies also recommend a closer mix of commercial facilities and
residential units to foster easier access to jobs and shopping. In
turn, these arrangements, combined with more sensitivity to
aesthetic needs, are supposed to create a greater sense of "place"
among residents.

While the adoption of land use strategies
that lead to greater densification, or more housing units (and
residents) per acre of land, would slow the already glacier-like
development of the nation's unused land, very few Americans find
crowded living arrangements appealing. With few willing to embrace
the environmentalist's vision of more densely packed urban
communities, smart growth advocates now seek to impose their vision
on uncooperative households by limiting tenancy choices with
policies that raise the cost of housing options they oppose. Among
the popular cost-raising, growth-limiting mechanisms to control
suburbanization in this way are charging homebuyers higher building
and impact fees and/or taxes, adding more regulation and
restrictive zoning, and establishing growth boundaries to deny land
for building.

Critics of these costly and coercive
growth-management schemes have been aware of the problems such
regulations create for potential homebuyers with modest incomes,
especially minorities. Such concerns have begun to influence the
smart growth debate in recent years.

In
2001, for example, Heritage Foundation scholars expressed alarm
about the connection between high costs and diminished opportunity
in a study titled "Smart Growth, Housing Costs, and Homeownership."
They concluded that, "By raising home prices, such policies force
households of modest means into smaller units, or out of the
community altogether." Largely, the burden is borne by entry-level
homebuyers and other households with low to moderate incomes. And
as more of these households are forced into the rental market as
such policies become more commonplace, the rate of homeownership
will fall. "Those who are harmed by escalating prices," noted the
scholars, "are those who are not yet owners, and this group
consists largely of those with household incomes below the median,
especially racial minorities."

The
Administration is correct to oppose the Community Character Act,
and Members of Congress who have not yet made up their minds on
such legislation should carefully review this bill's potentially
adverse effects and the elitist land use schemes behind it. Rather
than promote policies that limit opportunity, the Administration
and Congress should confirm long-standing American principles of
free choice and market solutions, including the right of people to
live and work how and where they like. Federal leaders should
reject centralized planning by any level of government, encourage
diversity in neighborhood design, and foster decentralized
decision-making on land use.

The
10 principles in the so-called Lone Mountain Compact developed at a
conference on sprawl in 2000 should serve as guidelines for local
officials, builders, citizens, journalists, and academics who want
to make better judgments about the benefits and appropriateness of
policies that will affect community growth. They should also keep
in mind the question that Democratic Party candidate Adlai E.
Stevenson posed during the 1952 presidential campaign:

Our people have had more happiness and
prosperity, over a wider area, for a longer time than men have ever
had since they began to live in ordered societies 4,000 years ago.
Since we have come so far, who shall be rash enough to set limits
on our future progress? Who shall say that since we have gone so
far, we can go no farther? Who shall say that the American dream is
ended?

Ronald D.
Utt, Ph.D., is Herbert and Joyce Morgan Senior Research
Fellow in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies
at The Heritage Foundation.